Changes…

… is the subject of the virus mails I had in my SPAM-Folder today. And Changes there are: It seems that the most current mutation of virus-what-ever-its-name-may-be now uses HTML to format the ZIP-Password I’m supposted to enter in green and bold typeface. *sight*

And It’s not about those Mails I’m unhappy about. I have a SpamAssassin based filter on the server and the SpamBayes Plugin in Outlook (and Mozillas own Spam-Filter in Thunderbird) which protect me quite well from actually seeing all those messages.

No. Its three different type of messages I’m getting that I’m concerned about:

Per day I’m getting about 20 messages telling me that I presumably sent a message containing a virus which has been eliminated by super-tool 2000 ™. Stupid, as my PC is completely virus free and everyone knows that those viruses and worms fake their sender adresses. Although not happy, I took the consequence and updated my filters to catch those things.

About 50 messages per day are out-of-office replies of people I never met. I hate those as they are completly unnecessary. After all Email is not a real time medium and if it’s really important that your customers get an immediate response, you can tell them in advance that you are not there or have someone else take over the communication. Filtering those messages proves difficult as I’d be generating the source for quite a lot false-positives

Finally I’m getting all those non delivery messages from MTA’s all over the world. Some because of integrated virus scanners (sometimes I’m getting even two messages per virus I’ve not sent: One commercial for a virus scanner and one non delivery report) and some because the destination users do not exist. Because the virus fakes the sender adress, I am getting those messages. And because I have the postmaster@<many domains>-Adress, I’m getting even more of those. Summed up, we’re talking of about 100 messages per day. Additionally, I must not filter those. I mean: There are about 1000 useful cases for non-delivery reports.

So, you see: The amount of messages I can filter with a good conscience is actually only a small percentage of junk mail I’m getting per day. Where does this lead to? How can it be fixed? I’ve no idea.